A lavish, no-expense-spared piece of coffee table exotica, this book is a strong candidate for the best volume on astronomy available to the general reader.

Most of its 576 large-format pages are rich with quality photography, much of it from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the book is breathtaking for its content and execution. Can there be a greater stimulus to the imagination than this?

There are seven principal chapters in Universe, dealing with, in sequence, "The Solar System", "Stars", Galaxies", "Modern Cosmology", "History of Astronomy", "Space Exploration" and "Observing the Skies".

"Stars", for example, covers 40 pages and contains text sections on the classification and types of stars; their formation, decay and death; double stars; variable stars; supernovae; star clusters; nebulae; planets of other stars; and, as a final inducement to wonder, a piece on astrobiology.

Some of the best photography is in "Galaxies"; the illustrations of the Coma Cluster, the HST photograph of the spiral galaxy M81, or the Palomar Sky Survey image of NGC 2237 and others like them alone seem almost enough to justify the price.

There are also more than 150 pages devoted to "Observing the Skies", with details of some 80 constellations, complete with charts and star maps for both northern and southern hemispheres. On top of that there are complete monthly sky charts for each of the hemispheres.

A glossary and a timeline of space exploration complete this massive offering, whose panel of contributors includes Sir Patrick Moore, Fred Watson and a dozen more high-calibre astronomers.